Textling #86

Had a run-in with time and lay in the car, stiff as a bell’s tongue, and just as mute. Pain in aspiration stage – still hoping I’ll hurl myself against walls, eager to chime.

After a blurry episode give looking another go. Burgess Park is not itself right now: tiny, lifeless, the green of grass and foliage moulded in the same garish tones. Clouds, birds, a plastic sun, tacked on a smudge of blue. We too minuscule and stuck mid-move in a scale-model some architect should have improved.

Bed, at long last. Limbs scattered like mikado sticks; palms so painful they seem large as cities. Must have crashed across the continent, one hand throbbing in Rejkavik, the other limp in the Aegean Sea. Each crumple in my sheet a mountain ridge or carved out canyon, nuzzling the gash of me. A chore to breathe.

Days shivering in sleety weather zones. I pine for hot. PEMalaise me not!

It’s a bookling!

Michell’s textlings are carefully crafted and tightly focused chronicles. Piercing and full of gusto, at times savagely funny, they give glimpses of a life (and many others) bent out of shape by a debilitating and little understood disease. Most importantly though, language is turned into adventure. Minute-work when energy allows - Michell's prose is lucid, luminous, and entertains, enthralls. Published by Palewell Press. Search for: